


The Sky Changes

by reconditarmonia



Category: As You Like It - Shakespeare
Genre: Alternate Universe - Always a Different Sex, Crossdressing, F/F, Genderswap, Pining, Rule 63, Schrödinger's Gay Chicken, Seasons
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-08
Updated: 2019-09-08
Packaged: 2020-09-28 08:35:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,272
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20423036
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/reconditarmonia/pseuds/reconditarmonia
Summary: Sir Roland's only daughter cuts her hair, falls in love, and runs away to the forest.





	The Sky Changes

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Nedrika](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nedrika/gifts).

A purse of gold. It isn't much, but it'd be her own. It wouldn't be a dowry that her father's tender care of her placed under the management of her brother, to be handed over to whatever husband might condescend to marry a woman with her small education, her lack of ladylike qualities. As though she's inclined to marry; at least her father's testament will not let Oliver force her.

She's strong from helping her brother's tenants with the animals and the haying; he's never cared enough to make her stop. The purse from the wrestling would let her leave him, and if she fails, well, it wasn't much of a life. The night before the contest, she chops off her long hair, realizing as she looks in the mirror how much she resembles her father. Oliver and Jaques look like their mother, but that something in the shape of her cheek, her brow, is her father's more clearly than ever; she could be him as a young man, and so she thinks she will call herself Orlando, as though she were indeed the son Sir Roland saw enough of himself in to give his name. When she visits Henry with the half-formed thought of saying goodbye, she frightens him near out of his skin with the fear that the dead are walking. It wasn't a well thought-through plan; Henry, as she suspected, is up with his old wound, but Alice, Joseph, and the grandchildren are already asleep, as are the tenants in all the other cottages, most likely. She lets them rest, though she might never see them again.

Oliver's dominion over the house has robbed her of any sense of its being a home to her, but her heart is in this land, the easy slope of its byres and hedges, green with summer, and the path that stripes the hills like a pale ribbon under the moon.

* * *

She had never thought that she would love, but the boy Cupid is a mightier wrestler even than Charles, and throws her for a fall.

* * *

Lady Amiens — Lord Amiens, once, at court — suggests, voice light, that Orlando build herself a house of paper and write of Rosalind on its walls and doors and roofs so that she can dwell inside her love. Orlando cannot do it. No house can hold her longing; it must scream out across the expanse of wilderness, words melting into the bark of each tree she pins them on, growing deep with the roots and budding in each new leaf, so that the rain and the rivers and the winds will carry them to the court. For Rosalind will never come here; and if she came, Rosalind would not know her for herself; and if she knew her, then what would they do?

Rosalind comes. She makes a prettier boy than Orlando, who is as gawky and angular a youth as she ever was a maiden, calls herself Ganymede, but Orlando knows her. Rosalind could be a tree in the forest and she would know her.

Orlando goes hot, goes cold: Rosalind is here, beneath the same tree, and knows her only as a man. Rosalind touches her cheek and her clothes, promises Orlando an audience every day, and loves her only as a man. Rosalind's cure will drive her mad indeed, and yet leave her as much in love as ever. It must be because she is already mad that she says yes.

* * *

She has been a fool. Rosalind knows — goes into raptures daily, Aliena tells her as they walk through the tall golden grass of a clearing, startling up speckled grouse and little blue butterflies, over her Bradamante, weeps nightly to be parted from her.

It is Ganymede, in Aliena's telling, who suffers these extremes for love, and Orlando doesn't know what to think.

* * *

Bridget and her family ask Orlando to bring her young man around, as thanks to the good strong youth who helped them with their little harvest, and she thinks of bringing Rosalind to eat at her brother's tenants' table at harvest time — of being herself to them, and bringing Ganymede. Duke Senior and his lords sit on a carpet of fallen leaves, brown and jewel-red, toasting in cups of clear cold water to the duke's daughter and to the hope that his banishment will end in time for him to see her married, and Orlando sees a life stretch out before her where Rosalind has everything that she lost and she is Orlando until the day she dies. Sometimes she dreams that the gods have transformed one of them to a man in truth, but when she wakes, she cannot remember which of them it was.

* * *

The first snow has fallen overnight, covering the foot-worn path, and Orlando follows the track of an ancient drystone wall back through the forest, pulling her quilted jacket closer around her. It is a gift from Rosalind, who claimed that Aliena made it. Orlando stayed the night with Thomasine and Sarah, who have lived together in a house near the stream since long before Duke Frederick ever thought of overthrowing his brother, and who showed her how to mend thatch and stop up the cracks in the walls against the coming winter.

Walking back, she is struck by the beauty of the great old trees, each one like an old friend, now with their black and gray bark edged in white, their branches and twigs like lace; of the snow on the bare rocks, growing glassy as it catches the steady-rising sun; of the impossible blue of the sky overhead, as she comes home to the clearing where Rosalind's house lies. Home — the thought comes to her mind before she can push it down, seeing the shepherd's cottage, with Rosalind standing in the doorway to greet her with warm lips.

* * *

Orlando knew Ganymede for Rosalind the moment they met in Arden, but meets her anew every day. Here is the Rosalind who quests after the deer, as brave and surefooted as if she were hawking in the dukedom that she is owed and that, Orlando thinks, her cousin will one day give her back. Here is the Rosalind whose heart will not let her hunt. Here is the Rosalind struck by pensive melancholy, who lets Orlando lie beside her in the straw and presses her back warm against Orlando's chest, lets Orlando's lips brush the short hair at the back of her neck, and the Rosalind overrunning with a torrent of clever words until Orlando is drunk on her. When she is absent, the brooks and the wind in the leaves carry Rosalind's voice and her scent to her everywhere.

Orlando lies with her head in Rosalind's lap, eyes closed while the icy wind shrills outside, and lets Rosalind stroke her hair, and thinks that when she opens her eyes they will both wake from this dream.

* * *

Rosalind starts to deny to Phoebe that she could love a woman, and Orlando watches her choke on the words, sees the lie sour in her mouth. Silvius and Phoebe don't notice, but Orlando does.

She shall marry Rosalind in the crisp spring cool of tomorrow morning, if she still loves her, promises Rosalind. As though she could cease, as though this strangeness could staunch the wound. Rosalind claims to be a magician, and Orlando would believe it if Rosalind said that she could touch a closed bud and make it flower; would swear to it, if it were only a question of Rosalind having magic in her lips or her eyes. Tomorrow will be the proof of it.


End file.
